Sphinx — Night, from the series Europe, 1925. Provided photo.

Yoshida Hiroshi’s woodblock prints set the tone, quite literally, for mid-20th century Japanese art. Yoshida’s work is currently on view at The Ringling Museum’s exhibition Yoshida Hiroshi: Journeys Through Light. Yoshida, who was trained formally as a painter in the Yoga, or Western style of Japanese paintings in the early 1900s, made his early career as a landscape artist, traveling frequently across Europe, Asia, North Africa and the Americas in search of inspiration. In the 1920s, however, Yoshida’s career stalled.

“In 1920 he was invited by a commercial publisher named Watanabe Shozaburo to design a series of woodblock prints, which had been gaining popularity at the time,” says Rhiannon Paget, The Ringling Museum’s Curator of Asian Art. “In 1923 the Great Kanto Earthquake hit Japan and destroyed Tokyo, including the print shop. Yoshida and his wife, who was also a respected painter, gathered up what was left and went to the United States together and later Europe to sell what they could.”

What Yoshida found was that his woodblock prints—the product of intricately carved designs pressed with ink onto paper—were far more popular than his paintings. What makes Yoshida’s work exceptional is the variance between different prints, often of the same design. Journeys Through Light explores those differences by focusing on Yoshida’s betsu-zuri or separate printings. “He was constantly experimenting with the palette, the textures, even if he wasn’t making an explicitly different version of that print, he was always striving to see what he could fo and what different kinds of emotional effects he could produce out of ink and carved wooden blocks,” says Paget. “People tend to think of woodblock prints as being multiples, just reproductions of themselves, but what this exhibition shows is that every print is unique.”

Although Yoshida was not the only artist making landscape prints, the techniques he employed, particularly as an independent artist, raised the bar for woodblock printers for years to come. “He produced these incredibly complex woodblock prints. Some of the images he created required a tremendous amount of printing blocks—typically with a woodblock print you have one block per color—he would go beyond that,” says Paget. “To get these extremely delicate gradations of color and the depth of the saturated areas, he would make multiple impressions just slightly adjusting the ink.”

Yoshida Hiroshi: Journeys Through Light, The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, 5401 Bay Shore Rd, Sarasota, 34243

Sphinx — Night, from the series Europe, 1925. Provided photo.

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